Saturday, May 30, 2009

Terra Incognita 87 (part 1) Who is fleeing Israel

Terra Incognita Issue 87

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. FrantzmanJerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 31st, 2009

1) Who is fleeing Israel?: A recent survey of the Israeli population claimed to show that 23 percent of Israelis are considering leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb. This concern about mass flight from Israel has been voiced before by scholars. It is also voiced in the academy where professors speak of Israelis “returning” to Europe. But all of this talk is predicated on a leftist Ashkenazi view of who lives in Israel. It is true that the primarily Ashkenazi leftist population of Israel’s wealthiest areas where anti-Israel protest is the pastime for Friday afternoon and military service is considered something “for suckers” may be considering “returning” to Europe, their cultural center. But the poor Israelis, the ones with roots in Russia and the Middle East and the right wing Ashkenazim aren’t going anywhere. They can’t “return” to Europe, they aren’t from there.

Who is fleeing Israel?Seth J. FrantzmanMay 24th, 2009

On May 24th the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University released a study that showed that 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving Israel if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. The report didn’t give a geographic, religious or ethnic breakdown of who these people were but several statistics reveal more about them. Those over the age of 40 were more fearful than their younger counterparts. Some 39 percent of women said they would consider leaving the country whereas only 22 percent of men said so. In addition those most fearful defined themselves as left wing voters. Thus those seeking to flee were mostly left wing, older and female. What demographic in Israel fits that description? Jewish-Ashkenazi descendants of the second and third aliyah who live in Tel Aviv and the Kibbutzim and who, as a demographic, vote left or extreme-left. This says much about this group. While living in Israel they support the Palestinians. Their secular culture is primarily directed at learning more about the “Arab other”. On Israeli independence day these are the people who go to commemorate the Nakhba. These are the people responsible for the fact that most University graduation ceremonies in Israel feature Arab music, rather than Jewish, western or Israeli music. These are the people who attend the belly-dancing classes. These are the wealthy people who drive cars and don’t suffer terrorism because they have poor people to work security for them at their left wing film festivals and they are not forced to ever ride a bus. These are the people with the dual citizenship who can flee the country easily because they have EU citizenship which they obtained based on claims that they were refugees from the Nazis. These are, in short, the exact same people who poured out of Europe in the 1930s fleeing he rise of Nazism, the same people who suddenly fled to Palestine, not as Zionists, but as Jewish refugees, when their beloved Europe, the culture of assimilation they so loved, turned on them.

And now they are going back. Not only are they going back but their culture so dominates the Israeli discourse that authors and writers falsely imagine that the nation of Israel is entirely made up of these people. Consider Benny Morris’ assertion in his One State, Two States that “The Arab community is predominantly Asiatic in character, the Jewish community predominantly European.” Or consider Ian Lustick who claimed in an article entitled “'Israel's Fight or Flight Response'” published in the National Interest that fears that Iran "might obtain a bomb could lead to substantial Jewish immigration from Israel." Or Professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University who noted in a recent Jerusalem Post editorial that “"Much to their parents' and grandparents' dissatisfaction, young Israelis are returning to Europe in droves and are demonstrating their preferences for European lifestyles and culture just two short generations after the Holocaust. Many of them are taking up their rights to European passports, even through the problematic adoption of Polish and German citizenship." But Newman, Lustick and Morris are wrong. Israel is not primarily a European country, most of its citizens are not lining up to flee and most of them can’t “return” to Europe because they aren’t from Europe.

The Ashkenazi leftist elite who helped found the state of Israel have given birth to a false Israeli-European narrative of a country full of Holocaust survivors who have dual citizenship and might one day return to Europe. But their narrative represents only that spineless 23 percent of Israel. It represents the wealthy in Tel Aviv, the people in Rishon and Hertziliya and Ceaseria. The people in Rehavia, Talbieh and Katamon. The people in the Kibbutzim. It doesn’t represent any of the people in the settlements, and there are 250,000 of them, or the people in the development towns. It doesn’t represent the Yemenites, the Ethiopians, the Russians or the Mizrahim and Sephardim. It doesn’t represent the right wing Ashkenazim and the settlers, who are mostly Ashkenazi as well. It doesn’t represent the Americans. Most importantly it doesn’t represent the religious Jews, the orthodox and black haters, the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim, the Lithuanians. The Ashkenazi elite of Israel worked for a long time to destroy the soul of the country. Through self hatred and comparing the country to Nazi Germany they torn down the country from within for years. They settled the poorer immigrants on the borders in the 1950s and didn’t arm them to fight the infiltrators that murdered and raped them. In the 1980s they drove up the prices of real estate inside the Green Line forcing the next generation of immigrants and vulnerable people to seek housing in the settlements. Those people who settled outside the green line they then called “Nazis” and “obstacles to peace” and bulldozed their houses and left them on the street. When the Russians came, some 1 million of them, they stuck them in new communities and settled them in areas that they were supposed to “judaize”. But their communities, from Gilo to Nazareth Alit didn’t become Jewish, they became areas of Arab migration where Russians, who have few children, either sold their homes to Muslims or gave their daughters in marriage to them. The entire Russian aliyah, 1 million strong, may not produce more than 200,000 children in the second generation, they are a community whose demographic decline is more severe than Russia itself.

But there is an Israel that is not fearful and has decided to stay. Some of them also have dual citizenship but they are not planning on “returning” to Europe. They know that Europe is the land that spit them out, the land that is littered with their graveyards, graveyards that are often defaced by the new favored, loved and coddled immigrants to Europe; Muslims. Whereas the Jews were crushed and destroyed the new immigrants to Europe receive amenities and welfare and support from the leftists in Europe, people who did nothing for the Jews when they lived their but do everything for those who hate Jews today. Those who will stay in Israel know that Europe offers nothing but a dead end and that there can be no return because it is not from whence the Jews came. Israel will be better off without the 23 percent, those who represent a parasitical elite, people who do not work but do protest, people who do not pitch in but call their fellow citizens “Nazis”, those who run from terror rather than run towards it to prevent it. When the 23 percent have left the best people will be left behind, the good hard working people, the poor without foreign citizenship and the wealthy patriots, the settlers and the religious, those who know how to fight and those who want to fight. Those who love the land and those who are part of it and wish to lay down to be interred in it. There is no going back, no returning for these people. These people are home and they will remain home to face the threat.